6 ms·

Everything Is Broken (2014)

91 points by Liriel 10y ago

majewsky 10y ago
(2014)
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Sung to the tune of "Everything is Awesome" from the Lego movie. Everything is broken, everything is hacked when you're on wifi! Everything is broken, when you're living out a cloud!
dom0 10y ago
(I did not read the entire text) A great many of the security issues that we are seeing in computing are mainly due to fundamental, architectural decisions (it's probably in the text), but it's not as if there is no choice. We had and we still have hardware and architectures that are not memory-oriented and don't use memory-protection, but are fundamentally object-based and use object permissions (i.e. ACLs), enforced at a hardware level. It's just that when these were introduced they were complex and either too expensive or too slow for the mass market, hence simpler architectures prevailed (and no one could've expected otherwise) in the mass markets (desktops, laptops, mobile, computer servers). The difference between these approaches boils down to memory-oriented systems being fail-open, information-dissemination machines, while object and permission oriented systems are meant to be fail-closed, information-protection machines at the hardware level (before adding millions of lines of C code distributed across rings -2 to 0). Note how successful information security nowadays tends to be based on similar principles, e.g. SGX or the Enclave on iDevices — the main processor and the main OS are so completely and fundamentally untrustworthy that you throw in either another completely separate computer, or strong-arm (some pun intended) protections at the hardware level, e.g. encrypting memory so the host can't read it, since it is physically unable to access the key.
- dom0 10y ago
  That being said "everything is broken" is a common theme / a painfully sarcastic in-joke between colleagues on the purely functional level of software.
- amelius 10y ago
  Most security issues we are seeing today are simply a consequence of economic decisions. Omitting security gives one an advantage in time-to-market. "Security can be dealt with later."
- jdietrich 10y ago
  Langsec FTW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY
draw_down 10y ago
If we could go back and do it all over again, we'd probably do a better job. Maybe.
- spectistcles 10y ago
  We'd do just as bad, but differently. Time makes fools of us all.
tptacek 10y ago
Even in 2014, I'm not sure what the takeaway was supposed to be from this, or why this was an article that needed writing. Was it the author's concern that laypeople felt computing was too reliable, too secure? The real problem is the opposite one.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  I believe this is partially a "Chicken Little" response to the "Fishbowl Singularity" we've suddenly thrust ourselves into - a number of individuals panicking about living under constant (governmental, advertising, etc) surveillance, as a byproduct of our internet-connected lives. On the other side, there are many more vulnerable IoT devices and CVEs today than there were in 2014, but even then the problem was evident. As another poster has pointed out, the solution seems to hide behind software ACLs and hardware devices, and hope that those are not also compromised. As an alternative - "Welcome to the fishbowl, please do not swear."
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    How can you possibly imagine that this wont be used asymmetrically to a dystopian degree?
paulcole 10y ago
Counterpoint: things are pretty good.
f- 10y ago
I hate to be negative, but I've been working in the security industry for several decades now and... the article reads to me like a collection of condescending platitudes that attribute malicious intent or extreme incompetence to just about any person other than the author. Jumping back and forth between Snowden, PDF attachments, and C memory safety does not help. The online world is not particularly horrible; we overwhelmingly use it by choice, not out of necessity, and the benefits far outstrip the risks. Sure, it's also far from being great, and the genuine difficulty of designing complex systems in a secure way plays a role in this (heck, between all the interested parties, we can't even really define what "secure" means in practical terms). But it's not because everybody else is dumb. While I generally hate analogies like this, I think there are quite a few parallels between the online world and the physical realm, where we seldom settle on absolute security. You have a $10 door lock that can be opened with a paperclip, protecting probably in excess of $5,000 in electronics within your home. In that realm, we are far better accustomed to the trade-offs, in part because we have more intuitive data about what can go wrong. We also take a more dim view of a burglar than of a hacker, which makes us assign the blame a bit differently. In any case, with online security in particular, there some paths forward, including fairly plausible incremental strategies (better UX in the browsers and operating systems, better developer guidance, better mitigations, a culture of fuzzing and other security testing as a part of QA, etc). There are also some ambitious revolutionary dreams ("New everything! In Rust!") that may actually pan out if enough people get behind them. But I'm not sure what this article is hoping to achieve.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > we can't even really define what "secure" means in practical terms I'd suggest a very practical approach here: A system is only secure if the value required to break it is higher than the value that can be obtained by breaking it.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
    We can't even really define what value means in practical terms. Edit: Bank account information is valuable, but it's also one account number change away from being valueless.
beatpanda 10y ago
In the future it's going to blow people's minds that software engineers were ever allowed to work on systems that touch people's personal information without a license.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  Because they won't appreciate historical context?
- booleandilemma 10y ago
  Barbers used to perform surgery. I wonder if in the future there's going to be a divergence in the field of software between programmers who do the software equivalent of haircuts <insert PHP joke here> and those who do the "hard work", whatever that will be.
  - dom0 10y ago
    We already have people that perform the software equivalent of rocket brain surgery... ANFSCD: Have a free laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    This hasn't been a thing since what over a century. This is not why the requirements exist.
- mgrennan 10y ago
  Having worked for the state, I learned licensing is about protecting jobs of the license holders now protecting the public. Case in point. You need to go to school for two years to be a beautician. You only need to go to school for six months to be a Cop and carry a gun.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  It seems insanely optimistic to suppose that any licensing requirement implemented in scope of the current regime would be anything but will anything other than food stamps for whomever manages develops and implements licensing and manages the training process not least of which bureaucracies in schools. Little of it will even stick to the hands of those who actually do the teaching.
ge96 10y ago
(read top comment rambling) I had an odd thought today about the internet. I was listening to a podcasts (How I built this) and it was about AOL how the internet used to be illegal to connect to, modems, etc... It's just odd to me how we connect to the internet and we don't even see a screen, we're connecting to someone else's computer (though it's a public-facing server or whatever) but I don't know. Then you create the interface and your brain maps it out where things are. Even though it's all representative ahhhh. I don't know, I'm not really going anywhere with this but damn, I'm glad to be here now in this time. Though I wouldn't mind being in the future being some space pilot or something.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  I want some of whatever you're smoking.
  - ge96 10y ago
    What I was smoking is exhaustion /staying up too late. Now my day will be ruined because of this. Oh well. Got some stuff done at least. But then I wonder/start to question myself, am I delusional. Proof is in the money I guess.
    - nerdponx 10y ago
      I've been there. Get some rest.
      - ge96 10y ago
        Going to work to wash plates ha. Got my podcasts and my solitude. One... is the loneliest... numbah that you'll evah doooo... Anyway thanks
        ge96 10y ago
        Kind of funny how money on my screen are just digits, I could just open up the console and edit the amount displayed but you know... it's not real haha. I'm still poor as hell.
jjoe 10y ago
Is it really surprising that the brokenness of the online world resembles its real world counterpart?
mirimir 10y ago
I enjoyed the article. But then, I also think that everything is broken. So hey. Still, fonts where "0" (zero) and "o" (the lowercase letter) look the same are perverse.
d--b 10y ago
> Build it badly, and they will come. Good one.
lisper 10y ago
Ironically, every time I read an article on Medium I get a warning that some web content has crashed. I have no idea what causes this, but it seems unlikely to be anything good.
- ackfoo 10y ago
  It happened to me about a hundred times during the course of reading that article on an iPad with latest IOS. Very difficult to make it to the end. My guess is bloated active content in support of advertising.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

91 points by Liriel 10y ago

majewsky 10y ago

(2014)

stephengillie 10y ago
Sung to the tune of "Everything is Awesome" from the Lego movie. Everything is broken, everything is hacked when you're on wifi! Everything is broken, when you're living out a cloud!

dom0 10y ago

(I did not read the entire text) A great many of the security issues that we are seeing in computing are mainly due to fundamental, architectural decisions (it's probably in the text), but it's not as if there is no choice. We had and we still have hardware and architectures that are not memory-oriented and don't use memory-protection, but are fundamentally object-based and use object permissions (i.e. ACLs), enforced at a hardware level. It's just that when these were introduced they were complex and either too expensive or too slow for the mass market, hence simpler architectures prevailed (and no one could've expected otherwise) in the mass markets (desktops, laptops, mobile, computer servers). The difference between these approaches boils down to memory-oriented systems being fail-open, information-dissemination machines, while object and permission oriented systems are meant to be fail-closed, information-protection machines at the hardware level (before adding millions of lines of C code distributed across rings -2 to 0). Note how successful information security nowadays tends to be based on similar principles, e.g. SGX or the Enclave on iDevices — the main processor and the main OS are so completely and fundamentally untrustworthy that you throw in either another completely separate computer, or strong-arm (some pun intended) protections at the hardware level, e.g. encrypting memory so the host can't read it, since it is physically unable to access the key.

dom0 10y ago
That being said "everything is broken" is a common theme / a painfully sarcastic in-joke between colleagues on the purely functional level of software.
amelius 10y ago
Most security issues we are seeing today are simply a consequence of economic decisions. Omitting security gives one an advantage in time-to-market. "Security can be dealt with later."
jdietrich 10y ago
Langsec FTW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY

draw_down 10y ago

If we could go back and do it all over again, we'd probably do a better job. Maybe.

spectistcles 10y ago
We'd do just as bad, but differently. Time makes fools of us all.

tptacek 10y ago

Even in 2014, I'm not sure what the takeaway was supposed to be from this, or why this was an article that needed writing. Was it the author's concern that laypeople felt computing was too reliable, too secure? The real problem is the opposite one.

stephengillie 10y ago
I believe this is partially a "Chicken Little" response to the "Fishbowl Singularity" we've suddenly thrust ourselves into - a number of individuals panicking about living under constant (governmental, advertising, etc) surveillance, as a byproduct of our internet-connected lives. On the other side, there are many more vulnerable IoT devices and CVEs today than there were in 2014, but even then the problem was evident. As another poster has pointed out, the solution seems to hide behind software ACLs and hardware devices, and hope that those are not also compromised. As an alternative - "Welcome to the fishbowl, please do not swear."
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  How can you possibly imagine that this wont be used asymmetrically to a dystopian degree?

paulcole 10y ago

Counterpoint: things are pretty good.

f- 10y ago

I hate to be negative, but I've been working in the security industry for several decades now and... the article reads to me like a collection of condescending platitudes that attribute malicious intent or extreme incompetence to just about any person other than the author. Jumping back and forth between Snowden, PDF attachments, and C memory safety does not help. The online world is not particularly horrible; we overwhelmingly use it by choice, not out of necessity, and the benefits far outstrip the risks. Sure, it's also far from being great, and the genuine difficulty of designing complex systems in a secure way plays a role in this (heck, between all the interested parties, we can't even really define what "secure" means in practical terms). But it's not because everybody else is dumb. While I generally hate analogies like this, I think there are quite a few parallels between the online world and the physical realm, where we seldom settle on absolute security. You have a $10 door lock that can be opened with a paperclip, protecting probably in excess of $5,000 in electronics within your home. In that realm, we are far better accustomed to the trade-offs, in part because we have more intuitive data about what can go wrong. We also take a more dim view of a burglar than of a hacker, which makes us assign the blame a bit differently. In any case, with online security in particular, there some paths forward, including fairly plausible incremental strategies (better UX in the browsers and operating systems, better developer guidance, better mitigations, a culture of fuzzing and other security testing as a part of QA, etc). There are also some ambitious revolutionary dreams ("New everything! In Rust!") that may actually pan out if enough people get behind them. But I'm not sure what this article is hoping to achieve.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 10y ago
> we can't even really define what "secure" means in practical terms I'd suggest a very practical approach here: A system is only secure if the value required to break it is higher than the value that can be obtained by breaking it.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  We can't even really define what value means in practical terms. Edit: Bank account information is valuable, but it's also one account number change away from being valueless.

beatpanda 10y ago

In the future it's going to blow people's minds that software engineers were ever allowed to work on systems that touch people's personal information without a license.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
Because they won't appreciate historical context?
booleandilemma 10y ago
Barbers used to perform surgery. I wonder if in the future there's going to be a divergence in the field of software between programmers who do the software equivalent of haircuts <insert PHP joke here> and those who do the "hard work", whatever that will be.
- dom0 10y ago
  We already have people that perform the software equivalent of rocket brain surgery... ANFSCD: Have a free laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  This hasn't been a thing since what over a century. This is not why the requirements exist.
mgrennan 10y ago
Having worked for the state, I learned licensing is about protecting jobs of the license holders now protecting the public. Case in point. You need to go to school for two years to be a beautician. You only need to go to school for six months to be a Cop and carry a gun.
michaelmrose 10y ago
It seems insanely optimistic to suppose that any licensing requirement implemented in scope of the current regime would be anything but will anything other than food stamps for whomever manages develops and implements licensing and manages the training process not least of which bureaucracies in schools. Little of it will even stick to the hands of those who actually do the teaching.

ge96 10y ago

(read top comment rambling) I had an odd thought today about the internet. I was listening to a podcasts (How I built this) and it was about AOL how the internet used to be illegal to connect to, modems, etc... It's just odd to me how we connect to the internet and we don't even see a screen, we're connecting to someone else's computer (though it's a public-facing server or whatever) but I don't know. Then you create the interface and your brain maps it out where things are. Even though it's all representative ahhhh. I don't know, I'm not really going anywhere with this but damn, I'm glad to be here now in this time. Though I wouldn't mind being in the future being some space pilot or something.

nerdponx 10y ago
I want some of whatever you're smoking.
- ge96 10y ago
  What I was smoking is exhaustion /staying up too late. Now my day will be ruined because of this. Oh well. Got some stuff done at least. But then I wonder/start to question myself, am I delusional. Proof is in the money I guess.
  - nerdponx 10y ago
    I've been there. Get some rest.
    - ge96 10y ago
      Going to work to wash plates ha. Got my podcasts and my solitude. One... is the loneliest... numbah that you'll evah doooo... Anyway thanks
      - ge96 10y ago
        Kind of funny how money on my screen are just digits, I could just open up the console and edit the amount displayed but you know... it's not real haha. I'm still poor as hell.

jjoe 10y ago

Is it really surprising that the brokenness of the online world resembles its real world counterpart?

mirimir 10y ago

I enjoyed the article. But then, I also think that everything is broken. So hey. Still, fonts where "0" (zero) and "o" (the lowercase letter) look the same are perverse.

d--b 10y ago

> Build it badly, and they will come. Good one.

lisper 10y ago

Ironically, every time I read an article on Medium I get a warning that some web content has crashed. I have no idea what causes this, but it seems unlikely to be anything good.

ackfoo 10y ago
It happened to me about a hundred times during the course of reading that article on an iPad with latest IOS. Very difficult to make it to the end. My guess is bloated active content in support of advertising.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]